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- Jan 28, 2011
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Tags: Serpent in the Staglands; Whalenought Studios
Version 1.5 of the Serpent in the Staglands beta was released to backers today. Along with it comes a new Kickstarter update, which also has some information about the game's physical reward tier, which is a hardcover leather journal. I'll skip that part, but check it out if you want to see Joe, his cat, and lots of photos of huge sheets of leather.
For those who have beta access, or maybe haven’t played since some of the earlier builds, we encourage you to download the newest patch and take a look. We’ve tackled the majority of the UI functionally, added lots of small polish items, and have finally implemented the prime NPC database, which completely rebalances the combat difficulty. This is what we’ve been using to test later game scenarios and individual enemies, and thought it would be a good time to introduce it into the beta and have you all test what the actual game difficulty was designed to be. I’d go into the details, but it would probably be best just played. If you were quick saving a lot before due to bugs, we’d advise you do so now instead for the amped up difficulty across the board, especially during the early areas you're testing. Wildlife, acolytes, and even chicken goblins can 1-hit-kill an unarmored character if the rng god wills it.
We also have a list-inspection of items on the ground near characters. A few folks mentioned wanted to toggle a menu or backpack for looting bodies, so we’ve added this UI element by pressing TAB.
Both this and normal ground-pick up also now have the closest character pick up the item. Unless you are in a combat-tense situation and are looting, all the characters share the same inventory pack so we thought grabbing the closest character to fetch it was a nice convenience. The sparkle effect on an item now also displays over all environmental art and has a text description when hovering, so you can see it even if obscured (or can run around holding TAB like in Diablo and vacuum things up as you come across them).
Another note on the NPC database was their drop rules were updated. Everyone that has something equipped will drop it if killed (or have it available for magical pickpocketing), with some marginal room for breaking and not dropping for light randomization. A spell also has the ability to make them drop their equipped weapon, so later on you can use that to your advantage for largely disabling a singular threat. With the increase in drops, we also took a pass at adjusting the economy to keep things tight on supplies, though will likely need tweaking.
Lastly, as mentioned in a previous update, the skill point allocation now distributes HP per point, with the graph indicated below:
Thanks again everyone for all the support since the Kickstarter campaign, and the testers for continuing to plunge into these stages of development. We’ll be back next year with more info and more content for testing.
Interesting. Personally, I've always felt that the standard RPG Constitution stat was rather boring, so I approve of this approach.
Version 1.5 of the Serpent in the Staglands beta was released to backers today. Along with it comes a new Kickstarter update, which also has some information about the game's physical reward tier, which is a hardcover leather journal. I'll skip that part, but check it out if you want to see Joe, his cat, and lots of photos of huge sheets of leather.
For those who have beta access, or maybe haven’t played since some of the earlier builds, we encourage you to download the newest patch and take a look. We’ve tackled the majority of the UI functionally, added lots of small polish items, and have finally implemented the prime NPC database, which completely rebalances the combat difficulty. This is what we’ve been using to test later game scenarios and individual enemies, and thought it would be a good time to introduce it into the beta and have you all test what the actual game difficulty was designed to be. I’d go into the details, but it would probably be best just played. If you were quick saving a lot before due to bugs, we’d advise you do so now instead for the amped up difficulty across the board, especially during the early areas you're testing. Wildlife, acolytes, and even chicken goblins can 1-hit-kill an unarmored character if the rng god wills it.
We also have a list-inspection of items on the ground near characters. A few folks mentioned wanted to toggle a menu or backpack for looting bodies, so we’ve added this UI element by pressing TAB.
Both this and normal ground-pick up also now have the closest character pick up the item. Unless you are in a combat-tense situation and are looting, all the characters share the same inventory pack so we thought grabbing the closest character to fetch it was a nice convenience. The sparkle effect on an item now also displays over all environmental art and has a text description when hovering, so you can see it even if obscured (or can run around holding TAB like in Diablo and vacuum things up as you come across them).
Another note on the NPC database was their drop rules were updated. Everyone that has something equipped will drop it if killed (or have it available for magical pickpocketing), with some marginal room for breaking and not dropping for light randomization. A spell also has the ability to make them drop their equipped weapon, so later on you can use that to your advantage for largely disabling a singular threat. With the increase in drops, we also took a pass at adjusting the economy to keep things tight on supplies, though will likely need tweaking.
Lastly, as mentioned in a previous update, the skill point allocation now distributes HP per point, with the graph indicated below:
- Starting base: 20 HP
- Base per level increase: 4 HP
- Strength: +4 HP
- Dexterity: +3 HP
- Perception: +3 HP
- Occult: +2 HP
- Intelligence +1 HP
Thanks again everyone for all the support since the Kickstarter campaign, and the testers for continuing to plunge into these stages of development. We’ll be back next year with more info and more content for testing.
